I am Poem iMovie slideshow

In Year 5 English the students were learning about poetry. I met with the teachers and showed them a video that I saw in a presentation by Allison Mollica (@amollica) at the Google Apps for Edu European Summit in Prague. Her students wrote a poem about their home and made a video presentation of their poem. You can visit her site to see the original example.

We decided to use that video as a starting point. During our meeting we talked about making the poem and video more personal and also incorporating the bilingual capabilities of our students. We decided that the students were free to write their poems in either English or Italian. One of the teachers remembered using an “I am” poem from ReadWriteThink.com and after reviewing it we made copies in English and Italian for the students to use as a template.

Before we started working the classroom teachers and I talked with the students and we developed a rubric that would be used to evaluate the students work. We talked about what makes a good visual presentation: the quality of the poem, the images selected for the video, the speed of both the written and spoken words and the lack of distracting transitions etc.

While the students wrote their poems in class, I worked with them on their image research skills. We looked at the advanced search tools on Google. The students were taught to filter their searches based on the images dimensions, colors, and types of images. We talked about citing the images they used. We had a wonderful discussion about fair use and copyright for both school related work and non school related work.

Once the students had selected their images they began piecing together their iMovie presentation. We asked the students to read their poem in one language and put subtitles for their poem in the other language. They worked for two weeks in iMovie during co-teaching lessons, meaning that both myself and the classroom teacher were present during the four hours of work time that the students had.

Below is an example video, I had to cut a few parts of the movie out because of privacy issues.